February 2, 2018The February School

The MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology graduate students will set up a temporary school as an intervention into the nested ecosystem of education at MIT. This school will be a subsystem of education where students and the general public will be invited to participate in ACT student-led classes, cinema cycles, exhibitions, discussions, conferences, fellowship, workshops, construction, and celebrations throughout the month of February in the Wiesner Gallery at the Student Center. The intervention will use the structures and conventions of a typical university to explore other ways of learning, sharing, and building knowledge and community.

The organization and installation of the Wiesner Gallery space will be transformed into one of learning and exchange, where a collection of institutional educational furniture, curated and properly labeled, will define the arrangement of the seating. Lighting, carpet flooring, and vegetation will also be considered as part of the intervention into the space for the purpose of The February School. This intervention will be both the practical setting for The February School, as well as a collective art installation in itself.

In the context of a high-profile academic institution such as MIT, the ACT students believe that there is space for, and should be a place for, experiential/experimental learning and sharing on different levels. How and what we learn is traditionally structured in a top-down, teacher-student institutional system – this leaves little space for subjects, practices, and methods of learning that lie outside the authorized scope of the Institute. These ways of learning are often marginalized and forced to find their expression outside of this system. They are nonetheless essential to the lives, interests, and development of the student body. In this sense, The February School aims to open a path of sharing, reflection, debate, relaxing, and dialogue. 3 weeks is an unusual amount of time to begin and end a schooling cycle; the ACT students embrace the temporal limits as an opportunity to participate, produce, and co-learn in the spirit of exploration and experimentation that is the basis of any art-centric thinking.

The February School will be organized around a set curriculum of regular events/classes each running 3 times in the course of the exhibition (the regular program), as well as a few major events which will mark key points in the course of the exhibition (the special program).